[hylafax-users] Two simple HylaFAX Questions

I have two more quick questions with regards to HylaFAX
4.4.3 on CentOS 5 with a MultiTech MT2834Zb modem. As mentioned before, I’m
new to hylafax and am currently in the process of replacing VSI-FAX version 5.1
with it.

The two questions stem from my experience working with the
various versions of VSI-FAX:

Does HylaFAX support batch
faxing in the same manner as VSI-FAX? What I mean is, currently when
I run a batch fax job from my character based accounting system, I send
all jobs to one big file to be parsed by VSI-FAX based on embedded tags.
The file is parsed into many individual faxes and sent to all my different
clients. I just set my software to send the desired tags/parameters
I need, and VSI-FAX takes care of the rest…

I currently have my own little batch
processing BASH script I wrote to take care of all of this, because I didn’t
seem to find what I was looking for online… I found plenty about
batch faxing the same document to multiple different numbers, however that was
NOT what I was looking for… All documents differ and are sent
to all different numbers.

My BASH Script parses the files,
strips the tags into a seperate file, converts the rest of the document (PCL) to
Postscript (using GhostPCL from Artifex), reads the tags file for parameters, then
sends each one individually using the sendfax command and the parameters
specified in the tags file (eg… subject, to number, from,
recipient, etc…). The biggest problem with this is that my script
expects each parameter to be on a certain line in the tags file, and I can only
use the parameters my script knows about… Without having to
rewrite this script to handle dynamic passing and reading of tags, I don’t
know if there is anything out there in place to handle such a task.

And this brings me to my 2nd
question, does anyone know if HylaFax plans to support PCL to FAX
conversions, now that Artiflex has released GhostPDL under the GPL as
oppose to the old APL they had the previous releases under? Is
anyone currently working on such a feature? Even Beta?

I see Hylafax has a pcl2fax script
in place within it’s hierarchy, however when you open it up, you end up
coming to something that say it’s currently NOT supported…
I was possibly considering trying to tie in GhostPDL/PCL here somehow.
Has this been done before by anyone?

The GhostPCL, pcl6 command has
worked great for my PCL to Postscript/PDF conversions, but does NOT support
direct conversion to FAX/TIFF Documents I believe. I have some done some
pretty fancy things using the pcl6 command embedded into shell or tcl scripts.